How The Fuller Project is catalyzing gender equality through storytelling

By Claire O’Donnell, Together Women Rise Transformation Partnerships Writer

Women make up half of the world and yet, only 0.02% of global news coverage focuses on issues that disproportionately affect women. If the world’s news were a year, these issues would get less than eighteen hours of it. If it were a globe, the coverage of issues disproportionately affecting women would fit entirely on Fiji.

This is not an accidental oversight. It is a portrait of whose stories our society has decided matter. The stories a culture tells are not merely a reflection of its values, they are also the mechanisms by which those values are shaped, generation after generation. When half of humanity is condensed to a footnote, that absence is reflected in legislation, healthcare, policy, courtrooms and the daily realities of women everywhere.

“I am a journalist because I think that everything we are, fundamentally, is built on stories,” says Fuller Project Editor-in-Chief Eliza Anyangwe. The Fuller Project is the only global newsroom dedicated to investigative journalism that catalyzes positive change for women. 

Together Women Rise, a collective giving community dedicated to global gender equality, has been a proud supporter of The Fuller Project since 2025, investing $185,000 through its Transformation Partnership Program. We champion this work because we believe in the power of storytelling, and in what becomes possible when women’s stories are told. Because a world that tells the full story can build a better one.

The Fuller Project begins every story with a simple but radical question: what about the women?

Take Archana Ashok Chaure, who was married off at 14 to a sugar cane laborer in Maharashtra, India. Years later, she was pressured into an unnecessary hysterectomy so she could keep working in the fields without interruption. Her body, her reproductive autonomy, her future: all subordinated to someone else’s calculation.

Her story is horrifying. It is also, as The Fuller Project discovered, not unique.

In collaboration with The New York Times, The Fuller Project’s investigation revealed that Archana’s experience was part of a vast, deliberate system that tied women’s bodies to labor output across Maharashtra’s sugar industry and traced that exploitation all the way up to powerful politicians and the global supply chains of companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. The investigation prompted action from U.S. and European governments and major multinational corporations.

Archana is one of countless women whose stories have been brought to the world stage through Fuller’s reporting. From garment workers in Lesotho and domestic workers in Beirut to bread-makers in Ukraine, surrogate mothers in Georgia, indigenous land protectors in Brazil, and midwives in Sierra Leone, The Fuller Project’s groundbreaking reporting has amplified women’s voices and driven meaningful change.

Since its launch in 2015, The Fuller Project’s journalism has helped shape new legislation, end life-threatening practices, secure the release of large-scale public data, increase funding for maternal health care, rescue migrant domestic workers held against their will, prompt a major fashion brand to end abuse at a garment factory, and introduce legislation to ban virginity testing.